Libreoffice VS Openoffice

Saturday, February 25, 2017.
Libreoffice VS Openoffice

There was a time where choosing an open source office suite was an easy task. There was no doubt, no hesitation. Why? Because there was only one main, popular and well known office suite: Open Office. Then came Libre Office, and gone were the times where choosing an open source office suite was a no-brainer choice.

Now days people are wondering what the deal is with the LibreOffice vs OpenOffice fight. Is OpenOffice still maintained? What are the differences between OpenOffice and LibreOffice? We will answer those questions, and more, in this LibreOffice vs OpenOffice article.

How it all started

OpenOffice Actually OpenOffice was not absolutely the first main Office Suite available to Linux users. It all started with Star Office, a proprietary, and resource heavy, office suite from Star Division.

In 1999 Star Division was acquired by Sun Microsystems, and one year later, Star Office was released as an open source office suite: Open Office. Being actively developed by the OpenOffice.org community, OpenOffice rapidly became popular, and one of the most famous open source project.

In 2010 Sun Microsystems was bought by Oracle, and the development of OpenOffice was no more assured.

Libre Office

Libre Office After the development of OpenOffice was discontinued, members of the OpenOffice development team created The Document Foundation and released a new office suite: LibreOffice, a fork of OpenOffice. Since then LibreOffice was actively developed by The Document Foundation, new features were added and bugs fixed. In the same time, as most of the OpenOffice.org community developers were gone, the development of OpenOffice was stopped. Finally, in June 2011 Oracle contributed the OpenOffice code to The Apache Software Foundation's Incubator.

The verdict

If Open Office is not dead yet, Libre Office is well alive. They are basically the same office suites, one being the fork of the other. But Libre Office has been more actively developed, is supported by a large community. The Apache Software Foundation's Incubator will without doubt be able to improve OpenOffice and to make it a real competitor to LibreOffice. But for now the winner of the LibreOffice vs OpenOffice "fight" is clearly LibreOffice.

Download LibreOffice

Download OpenOffice

Comments

10 Comments
Anonymous
The two should merge

There has been talk of resolving things such that the LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org could merge, and I think that would be a huge boon to users and the FOSS community in general.

Anonymous
Serious bugs in LibreOffice

Looks like spelling is broken - at least for OS X users (defaults to German no matter what you do) fine if you're German, though! :-)

Anonymous
Libre Office doesn't work for me

I recently tried to install Libre Office 3.6 on my iMac running OS X 10.8. It produced an error message. I posted a help request on their forum but got none. I then deleted the Libre Office code and installed Open Office. It runs like a charm!!!

Anonymous
LibreOffice has significant issues with crashing

LibreOffice 3.4 installed on Xubuntu 12.04 platform running on SAMSUNG NC110 netbook: I have been using libreOffice for the past 2 weeks, and it is so slow in comparison to MS Excel. My one vocab spreadsheet isn't even 400KB, and it takes Libre Calc at least 45s to open and more than 15s to save it! Moreover, for small documents it crashes more than 1/5 times, and for medium sized documents like mentioned above, it crashes 1/2 times! It's simply neither stable nor efficient enough for any work related task.

Anonymous
OpenOffice for me

I just installed OpenOffice 3.4 and it works fine. LibreOffice 3.5.6 and 3.6.1 still have bugs and problems with documents (.doc). It really doesn't seem that there is much of a difference except that OpenOffice seems to be more stable (and LibreOffice is included in Linux distros). My vote is for OpenOffice.

Anonymous
OpenOffice is more reliable!

Fully agree with the other comments, OpenOffice seems to be much more stable than LibreOffice, which has got me into permanent paranoia because of the constant crashing. Example conditional formatting in calc. In LibreOffice 3.6.1 it's not saved (the next time you open the doc, conditional formatting is gone) and in 3.6.2 RC, the document couldn't be opened anymore because it would crash every time when trying. OpenOffice - no problems! Great to have a big developer community, but they have to appreciate that if they want to be a true alternative to M$ Office, stability should be paramount, followed by speeeeed!!

Anonymous
I like LibreOffice

I've changed from OpenOffice to LibreOffice 3.6. Everything works fine for me. The filtering bug is solved and the performance of LibreOffice is faster. :)

Anonymous
Im afraid OpenOffice wins by K.O.

If you want to migrate to linux from windows you will probably want to convert a lot of material created with MicrosoftOffice to your new office suit. If you have word documents or power point presentations which have Windows Metafiles (.wmf) or 32-bit Enhanced Metafiles (.emf) libreoffice is not an option. It just doesn't read them properly. Even the latest LibreOffice suite only delivers unreadable empty boxes. In contrast, even old versions of OpenOffice can load these kind of images without problem. LibreOffice wont even read properly files which had already been converted to *.odp using OpenOffice. I had to uninstall Libreoffice and reinstall OpenOffice to be able to use the documents and presentations that were originally created with microsoft software.

Anonymous
Libreoffice 4.0/4.1 is buggy

For some time I have used libreoffice instead of openoffice but I've been forced to retake openoffice cause of libreoffice crash when changing for example fonts anti aliasing or DPI plus a problem of refreshing that I've found the on version 4.0 and getting worst in 4.1

Anonymous
Reliability issues

I've lost content while using OpenOffice Writer recently so looking at LibreOffice as an alternative.From the comments above, both products seem to have reliability issues.

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